c’mon read my future you haven’t got any … your future’s all used up
I go looking for news.
What I get is speculation.
This is going to be bad …
This is bad news for …
This will have a negative impact on …
Might be talking about politics, Joe Biden, Mr. Trump, the Country at large, the World at large, the environment, the economy or University of Michigan Football.
Glooooom and dooooom but nothing ever seems to finally happen.
Of course, no one warned, predicated or said it will be bad if Hamas attacks Israel.
This Hamas folks just came out of nowhere.
Otherwise the news cycles just cycle along and we hear more and more about how this or that will be bad … when …
When?
I mean, When?
Just more speculation.
Prognostication.
Predicition.
So many of these news cycles have become seemingly never ending soap operas which is probably what the folks who find themselves the subject of these news cycles are hoping for so that we will get so worn out that by time it is time for the bad times to start, we will have given up and gone home.
In the movie, Touch of Evil, a drunk and worn out Otis Campbell like Orson Welles stumbles into the room of a gypsy fortune teller and demand’s that the fortune teller use the cards to tell his fortune.
“Come on. Read my future for me,” says Welles.
“You haven’t got any.” says the fortune teller.
“Hmm? What do you mean?” says Welles.
“… Your future’s all used up.“
The fortune teller is played by Marlene Dietrich wearing a black wig.
In and interview, years later, Ms. Dietrich said, “I think I never said a line as well as the last line.“
Your future’s all used up.
In so many ways, in too many ways, I feel like I know just what the fortune teller means.
Words I have never heard of but that I see in action almost everyday since moving to the coastal empire of the low country of South Carolina.
I live about as close to the seashore as one can live without being wealthy beyond my dreams.
I live in a coastal enviroment.
I live where where the majority of the birds that I see every day are known as sea birds.
According to wikipedia, There exists no single definition of which groups, families and species are seabirds, and most definitions are in some way arbitrary. Elizabeth Shreiber and Joanna Burger, two seabird scientists, said, “The one common characteristic that all seabirds share is that they feed in saltwater; but, as seems to be true with any statement in biology, some do not.
Seabirds have had to, over time, adapt to living by the sea or living by saltwater.
Again according to Wikipedia, one of the things that set sea birds apart from other birds is that they have salt glands that are used by seabirds to deal with the salt they ingest by drinking and feeding (particularly on crustaceans), and to help them osmoregulate. The excretions from these glands (which are positioned in the head of the birds, emerging from the nasal cavity) are almost pure sodium chloride.
I was looking up sea birds the other day as I had just snapped a picture of a sanderling or a plover to send to my sister.
I was mentioning to my sister how the different sea birds that feed along the wave line have beaks of different lengths so that as good things for sea birds to eat are at different depths in the sand, many different sea birds can feed along the same stretch of beach.
Just one of those cool little factoids of nature to keep in your back pocket when walking along the wave line with friends and you want to show some smart.
While reading about sea birds in Wikipedia, I read that just quoted passage and hit that word, osmoregulate.
I love words like that that I never came across before.
I also love any word that spell check tosses out which tells me the computers haven’t seen the word either.
I had to look it up.
Again according to Wikipedia, “Osmoregulation is the active regulation of the osmotic pressure of an organism’s body fluids, detected by osmoreceptors, to maintain the homeostasis of the organism’s water content; that is, it maintains the fluid balance and the concentration of electrolytes (salts in solution which in this case is represented by body fluid) to keep the body fluids from becoming too diluted or concentrated. Osmotic pressure is a measure of the tendency of water to move into one solution from another by osmosis. The higher the osmotic pressure of a solution, the more water tends to move into it. Pressure must be exerted on the hypertonic side of a selectively permeable membrane to prevent diffusion of water by osmosis from the side containing pure water.”
Osmoregulation is the active regulation of the osmotic pressure of an organism’s body fluids, detected by osmoreceptors, to maintain the homeostasis of the organism’s water content.
Simple enough, right?
I mean it means just what is says.
Osmoregulation is the active regulation of the osmotic pressure of an organism’s body fluids, detected by osmoreceptors, to maintain the homeostasis of the organism’s water content.
It takes the salt out.
Oh.
Simple right?
I enjoy reading books about walking the Appalachian Trail.
I come away with two thoughts.
These people are cool.
These people are also nuts.
But I read the books any way and often look up all the cool equipment they mention.
One of the many pieces of cool equipment mentioned are portable water filters.
It came to me that if one of these filters could filter seawater and remove the salt, they would be perfect for the beach.
I looked up the most recommended filtering product.
It was a series of bottles connected with a hand pump.
Fill up one bottle with water from your local backwoods, high in the Blue Ridge Mountain spring.
Pump the water through the filter to the other bottle and bango-presto all the impurities and chemicals and bugs and amoebas and other nasties that cause all sorts of problems you don’t want to deal with while walking the Appalachian Trail are removed and the water is safe to drink.
I contacted the company to asked if their system could filter saltwater?
Had I known, I would have asked if their system could osmoregulate water.
The company was quick to respond.
They told me their product COULD NOT remove salt from seawater.
They also had to point out that ANYONE who came up with such a filter would be a BILLIONAIRE.
Well, boy howdy but that shut me up.
But now I think, sea birds can do it.
Osmoregulation.
What’s the big deal?
Like those different lengths of beaks, sometimes you just have to take the back seat and the same time, take your hat half to nature.
draft michael jordan we need a center – then … play Jordan at center ...
In 1984, after coaching Michael Jordan on the gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic team, Portland general manager Stu Inman called Knight for advice on the upcoming NBA draft,” Bilas revealed, before giving out a simple piece of advice.
Knight counseled Inman to take Jordan, calling Jordan the best basketball player he had ever seen.
Inman told Knight the Blazers already had Clyde Drexler and needed a center.
politics itself mass of lies, evasions, folly schizophrenia
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism.
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’.
All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
From Politics and the English Language (1946) by George Orwell as it appeared in the book, Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. These essays were written during the period 1931-1949. While they have been published individually, they were published together in a Collected Works in 1968.
This essay, was written in the year after the end of World War 2, by the author of the book, 1984.
A time perhaps more hopeful as good triumphed over evil and at the same time more despondent with the advent of the atomic bomb and the revelation of the holocaust.
Mr. Orwell writes, “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.”
Chicken or egg?
Signs of the problems were evident to Mr. Orwell in the way folks used the English language.
As in 1946, so today, … political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
The new Speaker of the House has spoken out on he is guided by his Christian Faith and that, despite the evidence, feels that the 2020 election was stolen which means countless witnesses and courts are all part of the lying.
And when the new Speaker defends the indefensible, watch his use of language.
The defense of the indefensible.
Watch for long words and exhausted idioms.
Mr. Orwell does offer some hope or a sign of hope.
Continue to look at the use of language.
Mr. Orwell writes, “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.”
Once CAN think more clearly.
To think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.
Boy howdy, but I cannot for the life of me think of the last time I heard or read anything having to do with Government, elections or candidates that in any way referenced the concept of ‘thinking clearly.’
As Big Bill put it … ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d.”
And we can take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.
There is a name of a person in the news I would pay cash money to never hear again.
There is a story told during the era of FDR of a rich man who arrived at his office everyday, got out of his limo and bought a paper from the nearest paper boy, looked at the headlines and handed it back.
“What are you looking for Mister?” asked the paperboy one day.
“An obituary,” said the rich man.
“But Mister,” said the paperboy, “Obits aren’t on the front page!“
“The one I am waiting for will be.“
I am slowly becoming hardened to the fact that I may not live to see a resolution of this news cycle in my favor.
But the alloy of my hope is proximity.
Above ALL THINGS one must stick around.
One must be there.
I tell my kids (quoting Jim Harrison though they don’t know it) that the list of folks who get fired for being late to work is as long as my arm.
STICK AROUND.
BE THERE.
As the State of South Carolina license plates say, While I Breathe, I Hope!
